Dissecting my WinHEC talk

Dissecting my WinHEC talk

I got an email recently about a post on a third-party discussion board regarding my talk at WinHEC.

This made me chuckle. I assume it’s the zoom-in on the caption buttons that’s being questioned there.

I’m pretty sure if you look up my slide deck from WinHEC 2005 you’ll find the same image in there as well (but bigger). That picture was created to help communicate the difference between the transparent and opaque glass looks that we had planned. There was a matching opaque picture that didn’t get used this year because it wasn’t really relevant.

In any case – that picture was done as an illustration to communicate what it would look like, it’s not a screenshot of anything.

I love hearing all the excitement about the vector graphics capabilities in Windows Presentation Foundation and the pieces of it we used to build Aero.

For Windows Vista, we elected not to use vectors in how the rendering of the window frames works, for a number of reasons. We had a pre-existing designer workflow using bitmaps which we didn’t want to mess with, considering we needed it for other areas of the product. The WPF vector tools (the Expression stuff) were still in development, and even if they were ready, since we weren’t using WPF directly there would have been an additional layer of work to accommodate those that we didn’t want to take on.